Op-eds

Why Equity Bank Felt It Had to Become a Telco: Op-Ed Co-Authored by Senior Fellow Ignacio Mas

If you are an African gadget manufacturer, you do not want to have to produce your own electricity to run your machines. But if your local electricity company's service is unreliable, you take matters into your own hands: you buy a generator or solar panels. Now you are in the electricity generation business, and you may even sell some back to the grid. Would this be a case of gadget-electricity convergence? Would that be a case of you wanting to eat the electricity company's lunch? No: you did it because you wanted to retain control over your business. Total dependence on a single electricity supplier would have simply become unacceptable.

Something like that is happening to banks in Kenya. Clearly, money is tending to go digital, and digital content is tending to go mobile. So just like the gadget factory needs to secure reliable electricity, banks need to secure reliable access to the mobile channel through which so much of their service is increasingly served up to their customers. And in Kenya, the mobile telecoms scene is dominated by one player.